detailed legislation tools available at state and federal level

With elections coming up soon, you might be interested in a couple of tools from the Sunlight Foundation that lets you track info on state and federal legislation.

At http://openstates.org/in/ you can get info on Indiana house and senate bills and on legislators for the 2011 and 2012 sessions. For each bill there is detailed info on status, content, legislators who sponsored bill, and (if bill was voted on) who voted yes or no.
Example usage: Go to http://openstates.org/in/ ; click on the “Bills” tab ; under “Filter Bills” select the 2011 session and “Drugs” as Subject and then click on Submit. This will call up some 67 drugs-related bills introduced in that session, including senate bill SB 192 directing the criminal law and sentencing policy study committee to study issues relating to marijuana. Clicking the link for that bill brings up a page about that bill; among other things, under “Votes” it indicates the bill passed on Feb 22, 2011 with a 28 Yes / 21 No Roll; clicking on the link right next to that votecount gets us to the link http://openstates.org/in/votes/INV00000100/ which details who voted yes or no.
(Don’t worry: navigating the info there is easier than it sounds.)